LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE – After more than a year of digging, sniffing and tasting the soil on Mars, NASA’s plucky Phoenix Mars Lander has signed off for good, scientists announced Monday.

The robotic craft, which started its life at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Ca ada Flintridge, fell victim to the seasonal decline in sunshine in the Red Planet’s northern arctic zone, officials said.

The anticipated seasonal decline in sunshine at the robot’s arctic landing site is not providing enough sunlight for its solar arrays to collect the power necessary to charge batteries that operate the lander’s instruments, officials said.

Mission engineers last received a signal from the lander Nov. 2.

Phoenix, in addition to shorter daylight, has encountered a dustier sky, more clouds and colder temperatures as the northern Mars summer approaches autumn.

The project team will be listening carefully during the next few weeks to hear if Phoenix revives and phones home.

However, by the time summer rolls around again, the lander will be coated in a layer of dust, making it very unlikely that scientists will ever be able to re-establish communications with the craft, JPL officials said.

The craft had exceeded its planned operational life of three months to conduct and return science data. The analysis of data from the instruments is in its earliest stages, officials said.

“Phoenix has given us some surprises, and I’m confident we will be pulling more gems from this trove of data for years to come,” said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Launched Aug. 4, 2007, Phoenix landed May 25, farther north than any previous spacecraft to land on the Martian surface.

The lander dug, scooped, baked, sniffed and tasted the Red Planet’s soil. Among early results, it verified the presence of water-ice in the Martian subsurface, which NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter first detected remotely in 2002.

Phoenix’s cameras also returned more than 25,000 pictures from sweeping vistas to near the atomic level using the first atomic force microscope ever used outside Earth.

“Phoenix not only met the tremendous challenge of landing safely, it accomplished scientific investigations on 149 of its 152 Martian days as a result of dedicated work by a talented team,” said Phoenix Project Manager Barry Goldstein at JPL.

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